Race is key in shooting of Fla. teen

In lieu of a legitimate lesson, here's an NRA-style take-away from the latest Florida trial in which a jury didn't convict an armed white man of killing an unarmed black teen: Guns don't kill people. Loud music kills people.

But so does fear, anger and bigotry.

I watched some of the testimony in the trial of Michael Dunn, a software engineer charged with the murder of a young man who made the fatal mistake of dissing Dunn after being asked to turn down the music he and his friends were listening to in their Dodge Durango.

According to authorities, an argument began after Dunn pulled up along their SUV and told the teens to turn down the music. One of Jordan Davis' friends lowered the volume, but Davis told him to turn it back up.

Dunn and Davis argued. Dunn then pulled a 9-mm handgun from his glove compartment and fired 10 shots at the Dodge Durango. Davis, a 17-year-old high school senior with no police record, was killed.

Testifying in his own defense, Dunn claimed that Davis pointed a weapon at him, got out of the vehicle and threatened him.

"His threats and actions left no doubt in my mind that it was firearm," Dunn testified. "It looked like a firearm and he treated it like a firearm."

Except that there was no firearm. The teen was armed only with a smart mouth and immaturity, neither of which should qualify as a death sentence.

Yet the jury was unable to convict Dunn of killing Davis. The panel deadlocked on the murder charge, while finding Dunn guilty of three counts of attempted second-degree murder.

Yesterday, one of the jurors said the panel split over the issue of self-defense. This, even though the victim yielded only what Dunn called "thug" music, and he never told his fiancée that he saw a weapon after they left the scene and retired to a hotel room rather than calling the cops. That story came later.

A courtroom is a controlled environment, so jurors saw only a calm, mild-mannered man who was well-coached by his lawyers. They never saw letters he wrote from jail, where he refers to the innocent boy he killed as a thug. "The jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs," he wrote. "This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these (expletive) idiots, when they're threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior." Nor did the jury hear phone chats in which he described himself as both a victim and a victor.

Yesterday, colleague Clive McFarlane wrote that Jordan was likely perceived as a threat not because he was armed, but because he was black. His opinion attracted the usual vitriol from online racism deniers who like to accuse Clive, who is black, of playing the "race card."

But think about this. If a middle-aged white guy or even a group of them were sitting in that Durango, would Dunn have responded the way he did? How about a young white couple? Would Dunn have assumed they were dangerous "thugs" and open fire? In what world is it reasonable to take someone's life based on such skewed assumptions?

"According to Clive, whites are simply running around the country looking for black teens to kill indiscriminately," one poster wrote. "As long as there are folks like Clive invoking racism everywhere, racism will remain a serious problem in this country."

Not even close. Racism will remain a serious problem as long as we refuse to acknowledge that it exists, and as long as men like Michael Dunn are allowed to get away with murder because his fear of an innocent black kid is considered reason enough to kill.